Verizon Worried About SDN, NFV Impacts

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Genband Perspectives -- Verizon is banking on using SDN and NFV in its network to handle the growth in IP traffic, but at least one executive thinks the company is behind in thinking about the operational impacts of the emerging technologies.

Speaking here on Tuesday, Kyle Malady, SVP of global network operations for Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ), said that the carrier has a "strong program to leverage SDN and NFV," but he's concerned because he's seen a lot of hype of this kind in the past, such as with IMS. (See Defining SDN & NFV.)

"It's one thing to think about it on paper and another in the field with operational problems," he warned. "We are running behind in my company on thinking about the operational impacts of SDN and FNV on our business."

His main concern is that, in the past, if one of his engineers had a problem with, say, Genband Inc. equipment, it would call Genband. "In an NFV world, I'm not sure what happens," he admitted. "There could be a lot of different maintenance issues and people to talk to in order to fix one box." (See Liability Issues Increase in Virtual World.)

Cloud Means NFV From Single Vendor This is one of the major drivers we hear for cloud sourcing voice vs rebuilding a voice network (NFV or otherwise). A cloud voice platform consolidates over 10 functional elements into a single elastic, fully managed and horizontally integrated solution. And done so with the all-OPEX, success-based SaaS model.

So that's leveraging NFV but from a single vendor and with a better business model, single point of contact for support and lower risk. Cloud voice platform equals NFV plus NOC, plus operations. And done right, the cloud voice platform gives the service provider an elegant way to manage the voice business, not technology.

MNOs and telcos no longer need to run a voice network to be a voice provider. They should leverage the cloud, bot build one when it comes to voice. Their core focus should be on investing in broadband and mobility networks and applications not rebuilding a network that delivers a commodity service with declining ARPU.

I think you are a bit optimistic about Systems Vendors ability to control themselves. My experience over the past 10 years or so that the old multiple vendor thing has devolved into 1 winner and a stalking horse. Given the margin pressure and lack of differentiation that has been put into the business. The stalking horses slave away trying to get any amount of business and end up with less than they spend in R&D for a given program.

All,

To the main point here, there are two ways to proceed. Purists would like 100K employee organizations to completely redo themselves to use the new technology. Most people think that we will have experiments and trials. I think that the experiments and trials will lead to some potential actual RFPs for actual deployment. This will be true after there has been some time to consume the output from the experiements. The challenge is going to be is that nobody is likely to have the exact product requested in that RFP. On top of that things that actually get deployed won't match the RFP.

Use case at a time will be how this goes. Took 20 years for ARPANET to become the WWW. We are now 20 years into that revolution and think how different the prirorities are now. Why should I think a fundamental shift will take less?

Re: Choking throats Except you choke that one throat a little too much and you could sufficate them and then you suffer because all your eggs are in one basket. While not always the best to have multiple vendors which create more maintenance and operational issues, it's better to have them competing against each other to improve their products and reduce costs. Keeping Vendor X on their toes knowing they can be swapped out fairly quickly with Vendor Y who is already embedded in the network.

Re: Implementation @danielcawrey, good points. I think, however, that it appears that Verizon may not be fully recognizing the differences, which will truly slow down their understanding of the new. You first have to know what you don't know and then learn about it.

I think that has been the problem with much of new technology, the tendency is there to just think of a new application, rather than learning and understanding the technology and how it is different.

Implementation It seems like this is a common problem with any new technology. How do you plan for something that has not yet been implemented? If you don't understand the specifica consequences of things, it can be difficult to put them into any sort of context.

The future for SDN and NFV is inevitable. But its realization may be further off than many may think.

Six different communications service providers join to debate their visions of the future CSP, following a landmark presentation from AT&T on its massive virtualization efforts and a look back on where the telecom industry has been and where it's going from two industry veterans.

Level 3 Communications' Chief Security Officer Dale Drew says service providers, manufacturers and even consumers must combine to halt massive DDoS attacks using IoT devices in botnets. The solution he has in mind includes reputation-based routing by the service provider but also more secure endpoint devices and greater consumer awareness.

Chris Novak, director of the Verizon Enterprise Solutions Risk Team, explains that enterprises who don't conduct a thorough audit of their assets often leave some things unprotected because they don't know they exist. Many times these unprotected assets are part of corporate M&A activity but left unshielded they can become a hacker's playground, he tells Light ...

Adrian Scrase, CTO at standards body ETSI, talks about the various initiatives and specifications developments related to NFV, 5G and NGP (next-generation protocols) that will underpin next-gen networks.

GeSI is a global e-Sustainability Initiative organization bringing together 40 big multinational companies around the world. According to GeSI's report, information and communication technology can make the world more sustainable. Luis Neves, chairman of GeSI, shared with us his opinion at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF2016).

Mobile revenues are declining. Digicel, a player in the Caribbean telecommunications/entertainment space, has found a new way to engage customers and drive revenue. John Quinn, CTO of Digicel, shared with us its story at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF2016)

Altibox is the biggest fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) player and the largest provider of video and TV in Norway. They started out with zero customers in 2002. Now they have close to half a million households and companies attached to their FTTH business. Nils Arne, CEO of Altibox shared with us their story and insight on 5G at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF2016).

At Ultra-broadband Forum, Houlin Zhao, Secretary General of ITU, discussed how important it is for countries, companies and everybody to be working together to help to build the broadband and digital economies (UBBF2016).

GeSI is a global e-Sustainability Initiative organization bringing together 40 big multinational companies around the world. According to GeSI's report, information and communication technology can make the world more sustainable. Luis Neves, chairman of GeSI, shared with us his opinion at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF2016).

Mobile revenues are declining. Digicel, a player in the Caribbean telecommunications/entertainment space, has found a new way to engage customers and drive revenue. John Quinn, CTO of Digicel, shared with us its story at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF2016)

Altibox is the biggest fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) player and the largest provider of video and TV in Norway. They started out with zero customers in 2002. Now they have close to half a million households and companies attached to their FTTH business. Nils Arne, CEO of Altibox shared with us their story and insight on 5G at Ultra-broadband Forum (UBBF2016).

At Ultra-broadband Forum, Houlin Zhao, Secretary General of ITU, discussed how important it is for countries, companies and everybody to be working together to help to build the broadband and digital economies (UBBF2016).

ETSI has created an Industry Specification Group to work on Next Generation Protocols (NGP ISG), looking at evolving communications and networking protocols to provide the scale, security, mobility and ease of deployment required for the connected society of the 21st century. The NGP ISG will identify the requirements for next generation protocols and network ...

Digital Object Architecture provides a basic information infrastructure that can facilitate interoperability between or among different systems, processes, and other information resources, including different identity management systems. Digital objects are networked objects that are named by digital object identifiers and instantiated by an infrastructure service ...

Huawei's new CloudVPN Integration Services Solution reduces the complexity of enterprise-leased lines. The new solution was a joint development between Huawei and ten other vendors, including Fortinet and Infoblox.

Join us for an in-depth interview between Steve Saunders of Light Reading and Alexis Black Bjorlin of Intel as they discuss the release of the company's Silicon Photonics platform, its performance, long-term prospects, customer expectations and much more.

Even when there's a strong pipeline of female talent in the comms industry, it tends to leak all the way to the top. McKinsey & Company says women experience pipeline leakage at three primary points: being unable to enter, being stuck in the middle or being locked out of the top. Each pipeline pain point presents its own challenges, but also opportunities to stop the leak. Wireless operator Sprint is making a conscious effort to improve its own pipeline from new recruits to the C-suite, and it wants the rest of the industry to do the same. In this Women in Comms radio show, WiC Board Member and Sprint Vice President of Enterprise Sales Nelly Pitocco will give us her take on the industry's pipeline challenges. Pitocco, who joined Sprint in May and has spent 20 years in the comms industry, will also offer solutions, share how Sprint is tackling the challenge within its own organization and take your questions live on air.